The research proposed will investigate issues surrounding the adoption and implementation of several dental health interventions into public schools. It will extend knowledge concerning the processes of transferring efficacious health technology into effective practice, by systematic study of the behavior of users. A number of competing hypotheses will be addressed in the following four specific issue areas: Adoption versus non-adoption, Variation in extent of implementation, Innovativeness as a systematic tendency, and Sustained use versus discontinuation. The primary study design is a two-wave longitudinal panel survey examining the use of dental health interventions within public school districts. The first wave data was collected in 1979 in a previous study. This project will collect a second wave of data via telephone interviews with the same school districts. Data from both waves will be combined for analysis of causal models detailing the interrelationships among variables associated with each of the four issues. Multivariate analytic techniques will be used to test the hypothesized relationships within each causal model. Finally, the results of the survey analysis will be used to design intervention strategies to increase the extent of implementation in schools. One or more such strategies will be pilot tested in small-scale field experiment during the final year of the project. Data from these field sites will be collected to evaluate the methods designed to increase the implementation, and thus the effectiveness, of the dental health interventions.